Concerning Mary Wyatt’s alleged rebuttal to Amazing Ark Exposé

We were aware of the rebuttal of the
Amazing Ark Exposé article in Creation Magazine, but this is the
first time that we have actually seen a copy of it. Consequently, we have not prepared
a response to it and wouldn’t intend to do so, given that we prefer not to
waste valuable time on endless disputations with people who give a pretense of being
humble and having integrity.

It is all very convenient to be unable to include the 20 pages of accompanying documentation
about their claims, when it is just this documentation that has never been released
publicly which is at the heart of the dispute. What we mean by that is that they
could silence their critics if they publicly released these documents, but to date
they haven’t done so, and therefore they have something to hide (that is,
the documentation doesn’t really show what they are claiming). Anyway, we
have never been given this document before and had the opportunity to reply, but
we are amazed how ‘slippery’ the reply is.

First regarding other boat-shaped formations in the area. We know nothing about
the photo in question being ‘touched up’, and unless they name the person
who did the touch-up work their claim is unverified. Anyone can make such a claim
and get away with it. Ron and Mary Wyatt need to produce the person who made the
claim of doing the touch-up work for such a comment to be believed. In any case,
John Baumgardner admits in the interview they quote from that there are several
formations that have a superficially similar shape, which is exactly the point being
made about the shapes in the photograph. In any case, what is so deceptive is that
they do not admit in this reply that John Baumgardner no longer believes in the
site or any of the evidence as being genuine, and he is quite prepared to testify
that Ron Wyatt is an outright fraud. See
Dr Baumgardner’s interview in Creation magazine which makes
this very clear. To quote John Baumgardner in a favourable light as being in agreement
with them is outright deceit. The same is true when they use him to testify that
the metal readings were regular instead of random, as we claimed. John Baumgardner’s
statement, in any case, is not an outright statement and he would repudiate the
tape of the 1985–1986 field investigations that are advertised as being available
from David Fasold.

We stand by our comments regarding the supposed molecular frequency generator. There
may well be such a device as claimed by Ron and Mary Wyatt, but if it achieved what
they claim then every mining company would own hundreds of them. As for the radar
scans, we don’t have copies but an original set of the scans that were given
by Ron Wyatt to William Shea, who passed them on to us. Producing a copy of a radar
permit for 1987 does not prove that radar scans were actually done on the site.
This is a smokescreen to try and prove our claim wrong, but we stand by what we
have said.

Tom Fenner definitely made that statement, and it is interesting that in Mary Wyatt’s
response she brings another party in to the controversy, namely, Joe Rosetta, to
refute our comment about Tom Fenner. The claimed use of their radar work at this
claimed Noah’s Ark site in their advertising package is neither here nor there,
given that Joe Rosetta did not visit the site whereas Tom Fenner did. Furthermore,
Joe Rosetta was involved at an administrative level and therefore has his company’s
image to protect. Besides, Mary Wyatt admits that GSSI did not conclude the evidence
proved it to be Noah’s Ark at all, but that it was definitely indicative of
a man-made structure. But how would they know that for sure unless excavations were
made? The fact is that they do not claim that Joe Rosetta is a geophysicist or a
geologist, yet Tom Fenner is. When we tried to get Tom Fenner to verify his original
comment he backed away and Joe Rosetta came into the picture—it makes one
rather suspicious.

Nothing in the response goes in any way towards proving the sample to be supposed
deck timber. So what if testing has been videotaped - it’s the results that
count. And less than 1 per cent organic carbon in a rock does not make it petrified
deck timber. There can be organic carbon in a lot of rocks for a lot of reasons,
not because they are fossilised wood. Even volcanic rock can have organic carbon
in it from plant and other material trapped by the lava flows. Basalt is such a
lava. In any case, this testing was done six years ago, and still they haven’t
made public all the thin sections, etc.

We are amazed that the response should quote Baumgardner saying that as a scientist
he isn’t going to report to Los Alamos labs something he doesn’t know
to be fact, which is exactly the point I was making. That is, it is not a fact that
Turkish scientists found four foot long metal rods at the site, because Baumgardner
can’t verify that is fact. Can the Wyatts really seriously believe that people
are going to buy their story when they shoot themselves in the foot like this?

Dr Bayraktutan made the claims directly to us that Wyatt may have even put some
of the ‘evidence’ on the site himself. So what if people in their 1990
tour group personally witnessed Ron’s discovery of a claimed fossilised rivet
while others in the tour group found other items? It doesn’t negate the possibility
that Ron planted those things on the site before the tour group came. Again, this
reply does not answer our claims and we stand by them.

What has organic carbon have to do with a fossilised rivet? If it is a metal rivet
then metals such as iron would surely be one way of verifying what the object is.
A carbon content of less than 2 per cent is hardly definitive about anything, let
alone dismissing the sample as mere basalt. The analyses quoted in the response
are for carbon and not organic carbon anyway, and carbon can be in basalt in the
form of carbonate minerals. The response jumps from analyses for carbon to claims
about organic carbon which shows confusion about the two. Can anything the Wyatts
say be factual?

The response about the anchor stones is sheer nonsense. Among others, William Shea
has seen these claimed anchor stones and published photographs of them years ago
in the journal Origins put out by the Geoscience Research Institute attached to
Loma Linda University. In fact, William Shea’s careful documentation puts
paid to all of the claims made on this issue in her response.

We never claimed that what they regarded as basalt was in fact manganese nodules
from the sea floor. That is just mere twisting of words. Yes, we did refer to John
Morris’s claim about manganese nodules, but the Wyatts have completely misunderstood
and distorted what we and John Morris were referring to. It may well be that manganese
nodules on the ocean floor today have the characteristics described in the response,
claiming the Encyclopædia Britannica as support, but what we and John Morris
were referring to is the potential for manganese ore in the basalt on the site as
a result of the basalt originally being on the ocean floor and having manganese
nodules on it. Being exposed to the weather at the site would upgrade the original
nodules by supergene alteration to increase their manganese content. Thus the Wyatt
response is far from adequate and does not negate the suggested possibility.

We stand by what we said about the lack of complete Turkish government recognition
of the site. To be sure, tourism literature would take an opportunistic approach
to entice foreigners to the site by such claims about it being Noah’s Ark.
Such Turkish newspaper hype and Turkish tourism literature does not constitute scientific
proof about the site. As for highway construction, the road was never to the site
but referring to a nearby highway designed to improve transport and communications
across the nearby border. It was just fortuitous that the highway goes near the
site, and once again the Wyatt claims are totally misleading. Any activity by the
local Turkish authorities were only efforts to cash in on the Wyatt claims to make
money.

Selective quotation from the Baumgardner and Bayraktutan 1987 report cunningly tries
to evade the fact that Baumgardner believes the site is totally disproven. Equally
deceitful is the quote from the Baumgardner newsletter in 1988, when there are clear
alternative explanations for what was obtained in the drillholes given elsewhere
by Baumgardner. Yes, we did make phone calls to Bayraktutan prior to writing the
article, and on more than one occasion he asked us to help him with the research
effort and we did, including sending him copies of some of the raw seismic data
sent to us by John Baumgardner. In any case, the paragraphs in the response on this
issue following the quote from the Baumgardner newsletter are not a quote from anyone,
but are deceitfully put in the sequence in the response to make it out that these
are the comments from Bayraktutan, when there are no quote marks shown or acknowledgement
to Bayraktutan for those comments. So one can only conclude that these comments
are made by the Wyatts in order to accuse us of bullying and putting pressure on
people who once believed that the site was Noah’s Ark. We have done nothing
of the kind. It is sheer nonsense to frighten would-be doubters with the claim that
scientists and archaeologists would lose their livelihood if they stood by the claim
that this was Noah’s Ark. Where’s the evidence that that would be the
case? Someone like John Baumgardner, for instance, would have been delighted if
the site was in fact Noah’s Ark, and that’s why he was originally involved
in the research. When he found that the evidence wasn’t there and he had been
deceived by the Wyatts, he has been a firm denouncer since. And he wasn’t
threatened with any loss of livelihood.

The nonsense about the ‘gopher wood’ is re-hashed verbatim from previous
claims. The fact is that no Hebrew expert knows for sure what gopher wood is in
modern terminology, so claims about it being laminated wood is sheer nonsense, as
is the claim that pieces of fossilised deck planking were found on the site. Remember
that an Australian television crew went to the site with Fasold, Ian Plimer and
Bayraktutan, and that none of the claimed evidence were found at the site. In fact,
when they drilled a metre into the top surface with the cameras rolling they actually
came up with pieces of plastic in the drill cuttings. Bayraktutan was made to look
like an idiot for seemingly standing by the Wyatt claims, and for once we had to
agree with Plimer! Even Fasold had to change his mind in the face of not only lack
of evidence, but contrary evidence.

Well, that’s a few quick comments on the Mary Wyatt ‘response’,
such as it is. We hope they are of use to you, but again we don’t want to
be drawn into this controversy yet again. The fact of the matter is that the Wyatts
keep on dragging out the same worn out and recirculated claims without producing
any of the hard evidence. We have been through all these claims before, and nothing
new has surfaced to change our minds about Wyatt’s lack of integrity and all
those associated with him. Remember that we too have a vested interest in finding
the Ark.

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